Sowing Seeds

After a lovely breakfast of warm toast with strawberry jam and cheese, I sat in the shade of the veranda and contemplated the origins of the bread I have just had. Bread is made most often using wheat flour.  The bread we eat is a witness to the faith of a farmer somewhere.  When a farmer buys seed, the seed does not come with a guarantee that it will grow, or that it will give a good crop.  He takes care to buy good seeds, he even researches the different types of seeds available and makes an educated choice, but there is no promise from the seller that the seed will produce a good harvest.  The farmer buys the seed believing that it will be good.  He trusts that when he sows it, it will bear a successful crop.  He plants the seed in faith.

In a sense we are farmers too.  Every word we say and every deed we do are seeds we sow in the lives of the people we encounter along the path of life.  Unlike the farmer though, we seldom consider the crop these seeds we sow will bring forth.  We rarely spare our words and deeds any thoughts.  We never wonder what plant would germinate from the seeds we have scattered.  We are often quite careless with our words and deeds.

Words and deeds contain creative force.  Like a seed that is sown in a field, our words and actions are absorbed by the listener or observer, and it germinates and grows.  It becomes a life force and bears fruit.  It can be good for sustenance and growth or it can poison depending on what the seed was that had been sown.  It is our responsibility to take care what we say and do.  The most important consumers of the seeds we sow are our families.  Our children feed on the seedlings we plant in their lives.  They in turn become the product of what they ingest, and they again become farmers sowing seeds in the lives of their own children and the lives of the people they encounter throughout their lives.  The big circle of life, growing ever wider, generation after generation.

The seeds we sow are in fact our greatest legacy.  It is our children's inheritance, and in these seeds we find our elixir of life, we continue living on in the words and deed we left behind.  The question I ask of myself and that I want to leave you with is this:  what seed am I sowing along the way?

I love this quote by Ella Wheeler Wilcox:

"With every deed you are sowing a seed, though the harvest you may not see."